


Cojiro

by Catsnake



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: cojiro, grog
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 18:50:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7695421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catsnake/pseuds/Catsnake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Ocarina of Time, you can meet a strange and fascinating side-character named Grog a couple of times. </p>
<p>The game never does much to explain what's going on with him, but here's a small glimpse of what the deal is with Grog and that weird blue rooster that his sister gives you to find him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cojiro

The night: an endless depth containing nameless things. He could hear distant rustling: stray semi-feral cats roaming the alleys to hunt vermin; spiders the size of the stray cats or even larger, scuttling amid the darkened buildings and bushes of the village outskirts; other things less easily recognizable, perhaps even larger, faster, more fatal. Grog did not care. He was out here, one of the things in the darkness. He belonged here.

His lanky, thin figure sat leaning against a tree—his nightly post—shirtless torso skeleton-gaunt and pale even in the dim moonlight. At night, there was silence. At night, he could be alone. The threat of especially dangerous nocturnal creatures and impending hard days’ work kept even the nosiest of village neighbors indoors and asleep at night—at night, Kakariko Village transformed into an alternate self, an ominous ghost town, and it was all his to sit out openly in, his precious white bags beside him, unhidden.

They contained his greatest friend. There was a terrible emptiness inside of Grog, and nothing could really fill it. He knew this; he had long ago given up on being whole. But feeling like he wasn’t broken was another matter, and the herb concentrate in those bags gave him potent elation, more than enough to forget about the void in human form that was himself. The healers in the village used the substance to manage pain, particularly when someone’s wounds were especially grievous, but once Grog had discovered another use for them, he’d stolen small amounts periodically from the healers’ storeroom. If anyone was suspicious, he was yet to hear about it—which in this small village meant that no one was suspicious.

After all, Grog would tell himself wryly, was it not a kind of pain he was using it to treat himself for anyway?

In the late morning, he would get up and tend to the coop. That was his responsibility—the coop on the farm, cleaning it and providing feed and the general caretaking of its occupants. Of all the jobs he could have ended up with as a member of the family who owned and worked the village farm, he didn’t mind his so much. From childhood, it had been his responsibility to take care of the village birds. He had always been drawn to them. Watching the chicks hatch and fumble around peeping, feeling their warmth as their soft downy bodies clustered around him, he’d felt the closest he’d come to being at peace. The birds were innocent and silly and relied on him, and he enjoyed their presence more than any other living thing—and especially more than other people.

  
He was coming down from the effect of the concentrate, the world starting to lose its glow, beginning to feel real again. He thought about the blue rooster he’d kept when he was twelve. Blue birds were an extremely rare phenomenon; Cojiro was the only one he’d ever seen, and the only one the village farm had seen in decades. The blue rooster had been his constant companion; unlike the others, Cojiro followed Grog around even outside the coop, and at night it slept on the foot of his bed. Cojiro’s plumage had been gleaming and azure; its eyes bright and intelligent. It had been an exceptional bird in more than one way: Cojiro was mostly silent. It only crowed or made sounds at all when in Grog’s presence, and even then, Cojiro was quiet more often than not.

  
Even at that young age, Grog had felt empty and sad, though he hadn’t yet articulated this to himself. But Cojiro’s presence was quieting, reassuring. He loved that rooster as he loved a friend.

  
A squad of village boys of the tough, always-covered-in-dirt variety had been envious of Grog’s brilliant blue bird. They tried a few times to convince him to hand Cojiro to them: pleadingly at first, but increasingly threatening. Grog didn’t care. He didn’t value his well-being all that much, and Cojiro was his only friend. He would never hand the bird over. Then after the last time, when they threatened to break his nose and beat him bloody on the ground, Grog returned to his home to find Cojiro nowhere in sight. In the alley behind the coop, Grog found him immediately: a crumpled heap on the dusty ground, brilliant blue feathers shining through in the places they weren’t muted by dirt or deep red blood. His clever eyes stared blindly up, unfocused; his beak parted open in a silent gasp, blood pooled beneath.

  
Grog had gone inside the coop and sat down amid the other birds. His father and sister found him there early the next morning, still sitting amid the dust and straw and feathers, the birds clustered around him and in his lap, his hands absently stroking their feathers as his gaze pointed at the wall, or more accurately, somewhere far behind it.

  
“Sounds like your rooster would have been safer if you’d given it to us,” one of the leering boys had told him the next day.

  
And now, ten years later, Grog sat and wondered why he was thinking about this again. The herb concentrate was definitely wearing off now and he was feeling tired and weak. The sound of feet on grass moving toward him caught his attention, and he looked up to see a young boy, maybe ten or twelve, standing in front of him. The kid, of green clothes and blonde hair, was certainly human, or at least not a threat to him, but there was something quietly unsettling about him, some feeling of dormant power.

“People are disgusting,” Grog said. His head was beginning to pound. He wanted to close his eyes. “My own mother and father are disgusting. You must be disgusting, too!” He laughed drily to himself.

  
The child said nothing, only watched with a catlike quiet. Grog sighed and rested the back of his head against the trunk of the tree. At some point the kid wandered off, as quietly as he’d come.

  
Grog succumbed quietly to the aching of his head and at some point, dawn seeped back into the sky and the air began to lift with sounds again.

***

Seven years later, Grog had gone missing for a few days. This was not particularly unusual behavior for him; Anju’s brother was erratic, failing sometimes as of lately to even take proper care of the bird coop. His gaunt body had gone from thin to truly emaciated, and his eyes were hollow, the skin around them dark. She knew that the addiction that he thought was a secret—and perhaps it was, to most people, but she had followed him in secret on occasion, had seen him visit the old hag for potions to help survive the withdrawal, though he always ended up giving in to the concentrate again—had gotten worse in recent years.

Anju knew her brother was likely lost, and she had made peace with a very long time ago. Yet some part of her couldn’t help being compelled to help. And now Grog hadn’t been seen for at least a week, the longest he’d ever disappeared at one time yet, and she couldn’t stand the thought of him by a roadside somewhere, dying from withdrawal, alone. These were particularly dangerous times, and Anju knew that was entirely possible some other fate had befallen him; there was a near-endless list of possibilities that she refused to let her mind entertain.

  
And that was why, when the quiet, handsome stranger had appeared and had offered to help her, she’d entrusted him with a minor task, to see if he could be trusted. And when he completed that task, she entrusted him with the true task.

  
Days ago, very shortly after Grog’s disappearance, an extremely rare blue bird had hatched. She’d known of her brother’s attachment to a very similar bird, years ago. This one she named after his former companion—Cojiro—and this Cojiro had not uttered a sound since the day it had hatched. She felt somehow certain—though it was strange to admit it, even to herself—that Cojiro would not utter a sound unless in Grog’s presence. He had always had a way with the birds (he could keep them in line without effort when no one else could) and he and his favorite had been inseparable. And so to this blonde young man with sharp blue eyes, with his calm but unnervingly dangerous air, she entrusted the rare blue bird Cojiro, and asked him to find her brother.

  
Anju wasn’t quite sure what she was hoping for, but she realized, as the man went on his way, Cojiro in his arm, but she knew she wanted to see her brother come back, safe and alive.

  
Grog, unbeknownst to Anju or the stranger, was in fact still alive, for the time being.

  
He sat on tree stump in the eerily quiet Lost Woods. This was a place widely feared by everyone, and people went out of their way not to venture inside. Everyone knew the tales: it was a place of old and strange magic, a place where the woods themselves shifted so that travelers lost their way, remained in the forest forever. It was a place where, it was said, those who died within were reanimated as skeletal monsters. Grog had come here entirely intentionally. He had come here to die.

  
He had run out of herb concentrate and had become unable to procure any. He was well into the pains of withdrawal now; his body shook with tremors; his head pounded as though a hammer was being driven in the backs of his eyes; he’d been unable to keep food down for days and though it was cool and shady and breezy in the forest he sweated as though he were in the distant desert.

  
Grog had made his decision. He had come out here, with no concentrate and no withdrawal potion, and he was going to let it all end here. No more falling back into addiction, no more facing withdrawal, no more underlying emptiness inside. It would all finally fall into silence. There was a rare mushroom in his pocket, the very kind the old hag would use to brew him a life-saving withdrawal cure potion, but he was very far from her shack; his fate was sealed. He would never leave the Lost Woods.

  
As he sat shuddering, something moved dimly in his bleary awareness. A predator? He didn’t care. He was too weak to fend it off; if it got sustenance from his warm meat, then at least he did something useful for once, even at the end. The creature moved in front of him, and he saw wolf-blue eyes, the eyes of a truly noble beast, and then, to his surprise, it began to crow like one of his birds. Grog blinked through his delirium—no, he realized. The creature wasn’t crowing; the bird on his shoulder was. And it was no creature at all, in fact, but a young man.

  
The bird was bright blue…it couldn’t be, Grog thought. He must truly be dying now. Was the blonde man with the fierce blue eyes here to take him to the afterlife? But no, he was offered the rooster, and told its name was Cojiro. Grog was overwhelmed. The man was looking for him. His sister had sent him, he was told. Cojiro. He thought he would never see another brilliant blue bird in his life. The bird ambled up to his lap and settled there, staring at him contently.

  
The way the bird had acted with this stranger, its total comfort and contentment, was something Grog had never seen the birds do with anyone other than himself. The stranger stared at him, his face hard to read…concern?

  
“Please,” Grog found himself saying, fumbling in his pocket and weakly handing the stranger the mushroom, “Please…deliver this to the…old hag in the potion shop in…Kakariko Village.”

  
The stranger nodded sharply, seriously.

  
“You have to…make it fast, though.”

  
Just like that, the young man had raced off. Cojiro remained on Grog’s lap, making low, contented noises. Grog’s trembling hand weakly stroked the bird’s gleaming blue feathers. He slumped lower on his perch.

  
The stranger, meanwhile, raced back to the village. He arrived at the potion shop, leaping from his horse’s back before she had even come to a stop. The old hag took the mushroom and looked at him seriously, shaking her head.

  
“That bum!” she mumbled as she worked, her old hands surprisingly deft and careful, “He had to go into the forest.” She handed the stranger a potion promptly. “Here, give this to that fool. It is the strongest medicine I have ever produced…but it will not work on a monster.”

  
The stranger threw it into his pockets and headed back toward the door. As he was leaving, the old hag was shaking her head and cleaning workstation, mumbling, “They say that there is no medicine that can cure a fool. I guess that’s true…”

  
But as the stranger mounted his horse and took off from the village, Grog, back in the Lost Woods, watched the shifting patterns of leaves and listened to the wind and the curious absence of birdsong and rested his hands on Cojiro’s bright flanks, no longer strong enough to pet him.

  
He could no longer even support himself upright, and he lay on the tree stump, shaking violently, curled around the bird that looked him brightly in the eyes.

He knew that the stranger wasn’t going to make it back in time. He could feel himself slipping away. He was vaguely aware of a sound—Cojiro had risen to its feet, was beginning to crow now as it looked at him. The forest became a hazy mess of green and the blue in front of him. He felt like he was sliding softly into a warm stream. Some part of him let go, and he became immersed in the gentle blackness.

**Author's Note:**

> I was really fascinated as a kid by when you meet Grog in the game. The interactions with him are semi-hidden and never explained in-game: the white bags he's always seen with, his misanthropic attitude, the quest involving him that plays out pretty much exactly as I wrote it, where his sister gives you Cojiro, he gives you the mushroom to take to the hag, and (if the player makes it to her in under 3 minutes) the "odd potion" she gives you to take to him. 
> 
> When you get there, of course, to where he was sitting in the Lost Woods, you only find Fado, the strange little girl, and she hauntingly tells you, "That guy isn't here anymore. Anybody who comes into the forest will be lost. Everybody will become a Stalfos. Everybody, Stalfos."


End file.
